tuxmaniac’s blog

Since I will be heading for my Masters in Electronics at EPFL, Lausanne a few days from now, I have been brushing up my basics needed for the course. One such activity is learning VHDL (a hardware description language). I was going through several tutorials and came across many recommendations for Emacs as the preferred editor (Yes! My eyes glittered).

Googled for VHDL emacs mode and here it was. Unfortunately, “apt-cache search vhdl mode” didn’t yield any result. I have already raised a bug report for that in Ubuntu and a Wishlist request in Fedora (I like the Electronics Laboratory spin there). As always with anything related to Emacs, the mode is very good and tremendously helpful with the syntax and other prompts.

I will take up this packaging task if I find time amidst the preparations going on for the relocation if no one else pitches in. Definitely worth having this mode in the distributions!!!

Hello All,

We are pleased to inform you the next release of Gnusim8085. “1.3.4″ This release fixes two important instruction level bugs #1936852 and #1966993. Thanks to Marcelo Souza and Missouga Dongi for the patches.

Source tarball can be downloaded from here

Request all the Maintainers to update their packages in their respective distributions. Thanks in Advance.

Keep Simulating!!!
–
GNUSim8085 Team

On August 3rd, 2008 0900 hrs I landed up in Hyderabad, INDIA to attend mukt.in which was taking place at Osmania University. It was v2 for Mukt.in which was started by a bunch of enthusiastic guys in 2007. The event had started two days back (on August 1st, 2008) and from the talks that were going around, it seemed a good 2 days with over 150 participants attending the event. After meeting the SMC gang at the hotel and saying a “Hi! Bye!” to a couple of folks who were leaving that afternoon back, I reached the venue (Osmania University) by around 1100 hrs just in time to see the registration desk being setup. Met up with mbuf, Sup3rkiddo and loads of other ILUGC friends before heading to the hall where my talk on “Free Software Electronics Laboratory” was scheduled. The previous talk had started late, which means mine was half hour late too.

I saw a bunch of students waiting outside the hall and started having a conversation with them. Pleasantly surprised to hear that they were waiting for the electronics talk (yes! my talk, and they didn’t have the slightest clue who the speaker was). Got some “real” feedback on the event which had both positives and negatives from this little conversation I had. Time had come for me to take the stage and these poor fellows were taken aback with surprise as well as shock!! I love to play such pranks! Well, the talk on the whole was attended by a pretty small crowd but the level of enthusiasm and eagerness to learn was high and evident from the interesting questions raised. I walked through the wide number of tools available for students to use right from getting to identify a resistor value (gResistor), simulating simple Digital and Analog circuits (qucs), PCB Design (pcb), learning microprocessors and controllers (gnusim8085) and took them well into the toolchain for coming up with your own chip (iverilog, Alliance toolset, gEDA toolset). The students liked the flow as it started with tools available for simple and basic electronics and ended up in coming out with your own Chip.

Quite a few Fedora Electronic Laboratory CDs were burnt and handed over to the students. Some Ubuntu CDs were also distributed. As it always happens, there was after talk discussions with the students and I had to excuse myself for lunch. Had nice time meeting the other fellow speakers and finally in the evening we had “Lightning talks” by all speakers. The idea impressed me as it gave an opportunity for all other speakers, volunteers, co-ordinators to listen to whatever they had missed in the last 3 days. It was fun reducing a 1 hr long presentation to under 3 minutes.

Time to head back home. Shared a taxi with Sebastien to HYD airport and had interesting discussions on “India - country of contrasts”. Hyderabad airport is freaking good and I had an uneventful, relaxed flight back home to MAA (Chennai). It would be unfair on my part to complete this post without a few big THANK YOUs!!!! Thanks Redhat! Thanks Sankarshan! Thanks FEL team! Thank you Free Software world.

Full Flickr Set here
Random thought: Nice event! Will be interesting to see how it develops in the coming few years.

It looks like I have been on rampage when I look back at whats been happening the past week. List below:

Fedora Electronic Lab Updates:

- We were breaking our heads with this long standing open bug on Alliance VLSI CAD toolset. Decided to gather all my bandwidth to resolve this one quickly and it turned out to be a fault in lesstif library which is used by most of the Alliance tools. So registered Bug #457469  and now awaiting updates from its maintainer. *phew*

- My Love affair with Licenses seems to be continuing, as bad news arrived for SystemC and electric also seems be not in good shape to make it into official Fedora repos. But at least “electric” has some hopes if more effort is put in.

Ubuntu updates:

- Xcircuit is a very nice program for drawing publishable-quality electrical circuit schematic diagrams and related figures. There is a crash reported here. Decided to take it up and squash it and then this mail from upstream follows in a couple of days. Feels good!

- Avagadro has been accepted into Debian Testing. It should be nice to have it in Ubuntu. So bug #253324 is raised and awaiting a MOTU to sponsor the package.

- As mentioned before, my love affair with the licenses continued into gResistor as well. But this time Lady luck was with me and upstream promptly responded to fix the issue.

- Did a few bug triages like rising sync requests, closing fixed bugs etc.

Hope the good run continues..

PS: I will be at mukt.in this Sunday, August 3rd 2008 giving a demo on “Free Software Electronics Laboratory”. If someone is in or around Hyderabad, India at that time, catch me in Osmania University.

We have got a new mailing list for FEL. Feel free to join https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-electronic-lab-list and post your views, wish lists and comments. As Chitlesh has already pointed out here, the FEL team is growing fast and me being one such recent recruit was having troubles communicating the issues to everyone involved/interested. Mails were being addressed to specific people and were lost in the process. Also we were having severe time difference problems (though thats a temporary one for me as I will also be in Europe in a short time from now ).

Already, solutions for problems have started coming in seeing the mails I forwarded to the list for archiving. Am sure from now on things are going to look much much better. Thank you Fedora!

If you have a Fedora Account, signed the CLA and is a member of an additional group in the Fedora Accounts System, you can cast your vote to help decide the next Release Name of Fedora 10 here

I casted mine for “Whiskey Run” for obvious reasons What about you?

Free Software updates

- PIKLab, the  IDE for application development for PIC Micro controllers was failing to build from source on Fedora 9. Fixed it and uploaded into the Fedora repos. Thanks to Chitlesh for sponsoring the upload. Here is the commit message.

- Working on getting Ecos packaged for Fedora. Fedora Electronic Laboratory 10 “DVD” is on its way..
- Still no updates from the Regents of the University of California regarding the license of Magic. Still to get into Debian/Ubuntu. Same story holds good for IRSIM. But, IRSIM has an explicit COPYRIGHT file which clear mentions that it is licensed under GPL, the debian mentors team would want it to be included on all source file headers. May be I misunderstood this thread. If anyone can provide more clarity on this, I would be more than happy because its struggling to get into the repos.

- Committed a patch provided by Marcelo Souza to fix SF Bug #1966993 in gnusim8085. Still loads more to go.

- It is very clear now that Debian/Ubuntu are lagging behind in the tools available for Electronic design, embedded development. May be I can change that. Seems like the target I set for the year regarding the same is on track, just with some of the above mentioned license issues stopping it from going to completion But its Never say Die. Certain things are never in your hands.

Personal updates

- Been living like a nomad for the past few days out of my car. Sleeping at all friend’s places, using my employer’s restrooms to great extent.

- My three year long stay in Bangalore coming to an end. More updates on that soonish.

I have been meddling around with Free and Open Source Electronic CAD Tools for quite some time now by means of contributing upstream, packaging a few and evangelizing the use of these tools by Students. Sometime last year, I stumbled upon this “Fedora Electronics Laboratory” spin maintained by Chitlesh Goorah and began to like it a lot. It had almost all tools needed to learn and enjoy Microprocessor coursework, Microelectronic studies and basic Electronics too. On seeing the vast availability of these tools in Fedora and not in my favorite Distros (Debian/Ubuntu), I decided to make some of these tools available to the Debian world as well (partly successful and partly not).

Last week I was offered to help the fedora electronics laboratory project and I gladly accepted. Now, I have the official Fedora packager status and have already made couple of commits to the project. Thanks to Chitlesh and the fedora team and I am sure I will continue to contribute to the best of my abilities!

My “photographer’s block” mentioned in this post, continued into the second and third day of the event. The days were filled with exchange of ideas, knowledge. Conclaves had heated discussions on Proprietary vs Free Knowledge. Food on the second day was like a “kabab fest”. There were rumors after this fest that freed.in would be renamed again to food.in from next year.

The best talk of the second day was “Hacking the Airwaves with GNU Radio” by Rakesh Peter, a talk which I am attending for the second time (attended it during foss.in 2007). Very impressive and great to know the work that is going on. Shreyas came out with his “dormant” idea of setting up a Radio transmission during foss.in 2008. It sounds like a very nice idea to me. The day ended with loads of quotes flowing from the mouths of various people. Details are here in this post by Sankarshan.
Day 3 begins with me feeling the OLPC XO laptop for the first time (Courtesy: Sayamindu). Initially, I was feeling very uncomfortable with the Sugar interface but eventually started liking it. Then it was my turn to take the stage and in my opinion the talk went pretty well with a few questions asked. The slides of the presentation can be found here. The find of the day was “Purisia font”. I think I will use this font for most of my presentations from now on. Flight back home was very relaxing with me getting a seat right after the First Class cabin. Good leg room and the food served was nice.

Freed.in and the ILUG-D folks always make me feel “At home”. This is the second freed.in for me and the feeling while leaving the place just is the same. Hats off folks!! I will mark my calendar every year for this wonderful event and just the thought of meeting up with the folks brings in loads of excitement. I had pretty good discussions with Runa, Sankarshan and Pradeepto and I take home great memories from the same. Special thanks to Gora (who drank H2O), Andrew, Kishore, t3 (for lending his hair to a bunch of people), Old monk, Tirveni, Shreyas and all those who were involved in providing the entertainment. It was great fun!

One of my IRC buddies (he no longer hangs around) wahjava pointed a link to a fedora page. Its on “Fedora Electronics Laboratory” which contains a list of packages for Electronic Engineers and most packages are those that I have contributed to. I am extremely happy to see that a LiveCD has been created too. I would love to try it and give feedback. The interview with Chitlesh, the guy behind this project can be found in here

This actually made me think of a similar possibility in Debian/Ubuntu. May be a organised set of meta packages which in turn will install and configure related packages? for Eg. If I need tools related to Atmel AVR Microcontrollers to be installed, just do “sudo apt-get install atmelavr” or some such?? I am not sure if this is a good idea but can be refined to make it a good usable/useful one.

Suggestions from the community are most welcome. Or does Debian/Ubuntu already have a project on similar lines? I see a project DIVE on launchpad but seems not be active.